Riverhead school district to post armed guards in schools

Long Island Morning Edition

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Starting this fall, the Riverhead school district will post armed school resource officers at its high school and middle school, the district has announced.

The district has not yet announced costs of the initiative, but a district spokesman, Ron Edelson, said 75% of the first-year expense would be carried by Riverhead Town, and the remainder by the district. Thereafter, half the total costs will be borne by the district.

Resource officers, or SROs as they are known, are typically regular police authorized to carry sidearms. A recent Newsday analysis found at least 20 districts in Nassau and Suffolk counties already employed armed guards in schools or planned to do so. John Hildebrand reports in NEWSDAY that not all armed personnel are police officers, however. Under Riverhead's plan, officers will be employees of the town police department, with one assigned to Riverhead High School, the other to Riverhead Middle School.

Officers will work both inside schools and outside on patrol, working five days a week. Along with duties related to security such as surveillance, Riverhead's SROs will instruct specialized classes in subjects such as crime prevention and drug and alcohol education, according to district representatives.

Cheryl Pedisich, the district's interim superintendent in a letter yesterday stated, "The SROs will enhance the safety and security at these two buildings, while also serving as helpful resources for our students and their families, providing educational opportunities, and enhancing the relationships of students and the community with law enforcement."

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The Southampton Town Board this week extended a townwide moratorium on the construction of battery energy storage systems, or BESS facilities, for another six months, but seemed uninclined to grant an exemption to a proposed 100-megawatt facility that would be built off North Road in Hampton Bays, as a committee of town officials works on drafting new codes for where and how such facilities should be constructed. Michael Wright reports on 27east.com that the board heard a pitch on Tuesday night from lawyers for the group that has proposed the BESS facility in Hampton Bays that the project should never have been caught up in moratorium to start with, as it was on the verge of an approval vote by the town’s Planning Board after more than a year of review and should now be exempted to allow the application to proceed. “There is no basis for the applicant to remain in the moratorium — the project is too important to the Town of Southampton to remain on pause any longer,” attorney Keith Archer said — making a case that seemed to be a preamble to a legal challenge should the town not take his side. An engineer made the case that the designs of the proposed facility — 30 separate battery modules in individual enclosed steel “cabinets” — pose essentially no risk beyond the property lines of the 4.9-acre parcel nestled between the entrance and exit ramps to Sunrise Highway from North Road. Neighbors were not assuaged by the assurances, to say the least, and told the Southampton Town Board to stay the course in its ongoing effort to craft a new, better thought-out approach to siting BESS facilities than the one adopted into town code in 2021 that allowed the systems to be placed in residential zoning districts if granted a special exception permit by the Planning Board.

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Long Island home prices reached new highs in the second quarter as intense competition for homes pushed buyers to spend more, according to a report released today. Jonathan LaMantia reports on Newsday.com that the median price among sales that closed from April to June was a record $670,000 on Long Island, excluding the East End, according to the report from real estate brokerage Douglas Elliman and appraisal firm Miller Samuel. That was nearly 12% higher than in the same quarter a year ago. The firms report data for the South Fork and North Fork separately from the rest of Nassau and Suffolk counties.

On the South Fork…aka The Hamptons...the median sale price reached a new high of just under $1.9 million, 30.8% higher than the same figure a year ago. The number of sales also jumped 74% to 451 during the quarter.

Meanwhile on the North Fork, prices slipped slightly. The median deal sold for $963,000, 1.7% lower than in the previous year, as the number of listings jumped 49% at the end of June to its highest level since 2020.

The continued shortage of listings led to frequent bidding wars for homes. About 57% of homes on Long Island, excluding the East End, sold for more than sellers’ asking prices, which was just shy of the record of 59% set two years ago.

At the end of June, there were fewer than half as many available properties as there were in the same month five years ago, said Jonathan Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel.

The second quarter did offer one brighter milestone for buyers. It was the first time in five quarters in which there were more houses on the market than the year before.

However, It could take three to five years for the number of listings on Long Island to return to pre-pandemic levels.

"The idea of a significant improvement in affordability for homebuyers in any scenario I can think of over the next year or two seems remote, unfortunately," according to the Miller Samuel CEO.